It turns out that the “Bipartisan Stimulus Package” that Pelosi and Schumer have caved on is even worse than I had originally noted.<\/p>\n
It contains a provision that will completely indemnify irresponsible and negligent employers<\/a>, no matter how egregious their behavior is.<\/p>\n It can’t be bipartisan unless it shafts ordinary workers, I guess:<\/p>\n In early October, Harvard researchers sounded an alarm<\/a>: they released a report showing a pattern of coronavirus deaths surging soon after workers filed requests for workplace safety assistance from the US labor department. The takeaway was clear: workers are desperately begging the government to help protect them from a deadly pandemic, the government has been unresponsive, and lots of workers have subsequently died preventable deaths.<\/p>\n Today, a little more than a month after the study came out, the federal government is finally responding: a bipartisan group<\/a> of Senate and House lawmakers have announced legislation to shield corporations from lawsuits when their lax safety standards kill more workers.<\/p>\n In practice, the legislation, which is being tucked into a larger Covid relief package, is a holiday-season gift for corporate donors: it would strip frontline workers of their last remaining legal tool to protect themselves in the workplace \u2013 at the same time the unemployment system is designed to financially punish those workers<\/a> if they refuse to return to unsafe workplaces during the pandemic.<\/p>\n The legislation comes not only as workers continue to die, but also as roughly 7- 9%<\/a> of the total Covid-19 death count are \u201ctake home\u201d infections traced to employees unwittingly spreading the disease to their families and friends.<\/p>\n At the behest of corporate lobbyists, the liability shield initiative has spread like a virus<\/a> in America\u2019s political system: as the Daily Poster first reported, it coursed through state legislatures across the country after the New York Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo<\/a>, responded to a Covid-19 mass death in nursing homes by shielding nursing home executives from lawsuits \u2013 after a healthcare lobby group funneled $1m into his political machine.<\/p>\n \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers to spotlight what\u2019s really going on. Last week, she tweeted<\/a>: \u201cIf you want to know why Covid-19 relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to Covid without repercussions.\u201d<\/p>\n The bipartisan initiative aims to obscure its Dr Evil level of depravity by superficially depicting the liability shield as merely temporary. But that seems like a ruse, as indicated by private equity mogul and senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who said<\/a> the federal Covid-19 liability shield provision \u201cprovides a temporary suspension of any liability-related lawsuits, state or federal level associated with Covid-19, giving states enough time to put in place their own protections\u201d.<\/p>\n Though full legislative language has not been released, the goal seems clear: to give state legislatures more time to permanently<\/i> prevent workers from suing employers who endanger them, and to permanently block their families from mounting such lawsuits when the workers die.<\/span><\/p>\n\n